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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 13: Crystallization, Nucleation and Self Assembly II (joint session CPP/ DY)

DY 13.4: Hauptvortrag

Montag, 16. März 2015, 16:30–17:00, PC 203

Spontaneous symmetry breaking in 2D: Kibble-Zurek mechanism in colloidal monolayers at finite cooling rates — Sven Deutschländer, Georg Maret, and •Peter Keim — Universität Konstanz

The Kibble-Zurek mechanism describes the evolution of defects and domains when a system is forced through a phase transition with spontaneously broken symmetry. It describes Higgs field in the early universe shortly after the Big Bang or condensed matter systems like quenched quantum fluids. For a system with second order phase transition, the domain structure naturally arises when it is cooled at a finite rate. Since diverging correlation length are accompanied with critical slowing down, the system has to fall out of equilibrium for any non-zero rate; At this so called fall out time the correlation length is frozen out before the transition can take place globally. Within this picture, we investigate the non-equilibrium dynamics in a soft-matter analogue, a two-dimensional ensemble of colloidal particles which in equilibrium obeys the Kosterlitz-Thouless-Halperin-Nelson-Young melting scenario with continuous phase transitions. The ensemble is exposed to finite cooling rates of the pair-interaction parameter (being an inverse system temperature) at very different rates from deep in the isotropic fluid into the polycrystalline phase. We analyse defect configurations as well as the evolution of orientationally ordered domains quantitatively via video microscopy and show that their frozen-out length scale follows an algebraic decay as function of the quench rate as predicted by the Kibble-Zurek mechanism.